Tuesday, March 30, 2010

"HSBC Ejects Carbon Traders From Index" (CLE.L; TRE.L)

Goldman Sachs owns 19% of Climate Exchange Plc. wich in turn owns the Chicago Climate Exchange founded by a friend of President Obama, Richard Sandor.Links below.From the New York Times' Green Inc. blog:

The banking giant HSBC removed two companies involved in carbon trading from its Climate Change Index on Monday because they had lost too much value.

Analysts from HSBC said the cause was mainly that governments had failed to come up with a timetable for a global climate deal at the United Nations summit in Copenhagen in December.

“Carbon trading was the major loser from Copenhagen,” HSBC analysts said in their March 21010 Quarterly Index Review. “Cap and trade needs hard targets and binding rules – and Copenhagen delivered neither,” HSBC said.

Climate Exchange owns the European Climate Exchange, the Chicago Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange. The chairman of Trading Emissions, Neil Eckert, is also the chief executive of Climate Exchange.

Among companies joining the index were Renesola, a solar manufacturer with a heavy focus on China listed on the London Stock Exchange, and Universal Display, a United States-based lighting manufacturer listed on Nasdaq....MORE

...But the exchange acknowledges that on some of those outside projects, it is authorizing the sale of credits for cleanups that had been performed anyway. Richard Sandor, the exchange's chairman, says that doing so rewards "early action" and encourages other landfills to capture methane too.

Mr. Sandor says the exchange's main goal is to help develop a commodity that has financial value under any possible future U.S. law that to regulates greenhouse-gas emissions. The debate over whether or not a polluter would have cut its greenhouse-gas emissions without the financial incentive of credit sales is "quite interesting, but that's not my business,"Mr. Sandor says. "I'm running a for-profit company."...